Your Right to Know

Four years ago, they constituted 60 percent of the Republican caucusgoers and gave 46 percent of their votes to Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister, propelling him to a first-place finish. The choice was easy for evangelical voters, particularly given their unease with second-place finisher Mitt Romney’s Mormonism.

After Iowa, Huckabee went nowhere. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, a surprise winner of the 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses, was elected president.

Now, the state’s evangelical Christians, still expected to make up 60 percent of the GOP caucus vote on Tuesday, are in a quandary.

All six of the presidential contenders profess to be conservative Christians opposed to abortion and gay marriage. With those issues addressed and no Huckabee-like favorite, evangelicals are vetting the candidates with an emphasis on the economy and other factors, including which one is best-positioned to beat Obama.

“They’re concerned about jobs and the economy and what’s going to take place with their children and grandchildren,” said the Rev. Paul Dykstra, administrative pastor of Grace Church in Des Moines, one of Iowa’s largest evangelical Christian churches. “They have the same stresses within their lives as everyone else.”

The convenient media narrative, Dykstra said, is to stereotype the evangelical vote as a monolith whose members will move in lockstep to an anointed candidate. For this year’s Iowa caucus, at least, it’s a fallacy.

“These are people who have the ability to think for themselves, and we’re seeing that.”

Iowa Republicans have flitted from one candidate to the next. Variably occupying the top spot in polls have been Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, businessman Herman Cain (now out) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Iowa conservatives have “sort of wended their way through the candidates, finding them wanting,” said Cary R. Covington, a University of Iowa political scientist.

Of late, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have surged in the polls, joining Romney in the top three. National polls consistently have ranked Romney as the strongest Republican against Obama.

A poll of likely GOP caucusgoers released last night by The Des Moines Register showed Romney leading the pack with 24 percent, followed by Paul (22 percent), Santorum (15), Gingrich (12), Perry (11) and Bachmann (7). But the margin of error is plus or minus 4 percent.

Self-identifying evangelical Christian voters are ubiquitous at candidate events across Iowa, and interviews with them readily reveal the fractured loyalties that were absent in 2008.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a big crowd in a Marshalltown sports bar for a Santorum rally Friday night, John Mulder said he finally had finished shopping and bought into Santorum’s candidacy.

An engineer and evangelical Christian, Mulder, 58, said he went from Bachmann to Perry to Cain to Paul before settling on Santorum a week before the vote.

“My two big issues are abortion and homosexual marriage, and he has a track record of fighting on those issues. I trust him,” Mulder said.

He initially rejected Santorum because he didn’t think he could win the Republican nomination, but now he doesn’t care, Mulder said.

“I’m not going to worry about who’s electable. If I did that, I’d be compromising my principles. But I could not support Romney. He’s been a flip-flopper, and I can’t trust him.”

Yet, electability is important for other conservative Christians, and that’s one of the reasons why Jerry Neville is supporting Romney

As the 38-year-old store manager stood in the cold drizzle waiting for Romney to speak early Friday outside a West Des Moines shopping center, Neville said that Romney has “a high moral character,” unlike Gingrich, whom he rejected early because “I don’t have any good feelings for anybody who cheats on his wife.”

Neville said he is unbothered by Romney’s Mormon-

ism: “I don’t really believe that a person’s religion should be a factor. What should be a factor is whether they live what they believe and aren’t just a Sunday Christian.”

But the University of Iowa’s Covington said Romney’s religion is one of two strikes against him with some evangelicals, along with his switch to opposing abortion after favoring a woman’s right to choose while Massachusetts governor.

“They don’t really like him for reasons about which they don’t speak and they do speak,” Covington said. “The reasons they do speak about are that he’s flip-flopped on the issues and he’s not really a trustworthy conservative. The other thing that’s still important to them, though, is that Romney’s not a mainstream Christian. He’s a Mormon, and that is a concern to conservative religious voters. That was much bigger for Romney in 2008, and you really haven’t seen it front and center this time, but I think it’s still a factor.”

Duane Ohnemus, 51, a farmer from Milo attending a Perry rally in Indianola last week, said electability is a key reason why he is supporting Perry and not Romney, a multimillionaire businessman.

“The Democrats will eat him alive,” Ohnemus said of Romney. “He’s not a real person. He lives in a different world than most of us do. He doesn’t understand how most of us live.”

When devoted to a cause, Iowa’s evangelical Christian voters remain a mighty force, as demonstrated two years ago when they led the defeat of three Iowa Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn a state ban on same-sex marriage, said David Yepsen, a Des Moines Register political writer for 25 years before becoming director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University.

As Tuesday approaches, he said, the splintering of the evangelical vote among the candidates is the result of new priorities.

“What’s driving Republican caucusgoers is this funk in the economy and a desire to defeat Obama,” Yepsen said.

Since 1972, Iowa caucus winners have gone on to become national party nominees only about half the time. Sen. John McCain of Arizona finished fourth and became the first candidate ever to finish out of Iowa’s top three and go on to win the party’s nomination.

With the oft-dominant evangelical vote up for grabs, Tuesday’s Iowa outcome — and the meaning of it — is anybody’s guess.